People's Daily · 人民日报 · 1950–2026

How China talks about
the international order

中国官方媒体的国际秩序话语

Every People's Daily article mentioning 国际秩序 ("international order") since 1950, read by a language model and coded for its stance, the audience it addresses, and its theme. This site lets you see how the coding varies over time — and read the articles behind it yourself.

5,074
articles coded for stance on the international order
43% vs 2%
Accusatory share of articles toward the US vs the Global South minilaterals
40% → 1%
share of articles coded Revisionist (calling to replace the order): pre-2005 vs 2018+
defend
the most common coded stance since 2013

Descriptive research preview · data updated 2026-06-06

Stance over time · 各年立场

Stance toward the order, by year各年立场分布

Each article is coded into one stance toward the order. Toggle between counts, share, and flow, and click any year to read that year's articles below.

People's Daily articles containing 国际秩序, by year (1990–2025 shown). "Other" = on-topic but no clear stance. Coding by a validated language model (agreement with human coders κ≈0.68–0.79). Click a year to filter the explorer.

Who it addresses · 面向不同对象

Stance composition by audience按对象划分的立场构成

Each article is tagged by the main foreign actor it concerns. Each bar shows the stance composition for that audience (audiences with n≥30) — click a row to read those articles.

People's Daily 国际秩序 articles with a classifiable stance, grouped by main foreign actor (audiences with n≥30). Shares of each stance. Descriptive — the actor and the stance are not independently assigned.

Over time · 随时间变化

Order-talk volume and US confrontation国际秩序话语数量与中美对抗

The bars show an order-talk measure — total 国际秩序 articles per year, or the share coded Defend, Reform, or Accusatory. The line overlays a continuous measure of the US–China relationship: US isolation at the UN, China–US confrontation (GDELT), China's relative power, or US tariffs. Pick any pairing; each reports the association (Pearson r) over the overlapping years. Association only, not a claim of cause.

Order-talk measure
Compared with

Word vs deed · 言与行

Parallel-institution building and order-talk另建机制的行为与国际秩序话语

A normalised index of parallel-institution building (BRICS, the SCO, the CIPS payments network, renminbi reach) shown against a chosen discourse share. Switch the behaviour (deed) — aggregate or a single indicator — and the discourse stance (word) to compare any pairing.

Behaviour (deed)
Discourse stance (word)

Left axis: the parallel-building index (0–100; BRICS/SCO membership, CIPS participants, RMB payment share, NDB lending). Right axis: the selected stance's share of order-articles. Behaviour indicators are hand-assembled from the public record; descriptive.

Key terms · 关键词

The vocabulary, and its lifecycles话语词汇及其生命周期

Beyond 国际秩序 itself, a family of related terms rises and falls over time. Select terms in the legend to compare their annual frequency in People's Daily; click any term below for its background and dates.

Years 1990 2026

Annual = articles per calendar year. Rolling monthly = mentions in the trailing 12 months, plotted monthly. Drag the year handles to zoom the timeline. 国际秩序 is the coded corpus; the other terms are archive frequency counts. Click a term in the legend to toggle it.

Abroad · 对外讲话

What China says to the world在联合国讲台上的表述

China at the UN, by decade

China's UN General Assembly general-debate speeches coded with the same five-stance scheme, grouped by decade (share of speeches; n per decade is small — labels shown). Order-replacement language appears only in the NIEO era.

China vs the world vs home

Stance composition of China's UN speeches, of all states' UN speeches, and of China's People's Daily articles at home. The right-hand bar is the domestic comparison — what China says to itself, against what it says to the world.

In English · 对外英文媒体

The same order, in English英文媒体中的国际秩序

Stance composition by source

Stance mix of People's Daily (Chinese), People's Daily English, and China Daily, all coded on the same scheme, plus China's UN speeches for reference. China Daily and the English edition carry almost no overt Revisionist language.

One stance's share over time, by source

Stance
Sources

Share of each source's articles coded with the selected stance, per year (China Daily from 2001; People's Daily English, the dashed line, from 2014). Early China-Daily years are thin — hover for the article count (n). Pick a stance, and toggle sources on or off to compare China Daily against the People's Daily editions.

English corpora: China Daily (n=2,654, 2001–2026) and People's Daily English (n=2,345, 2014–2026), found by the same order vocabulary and coded on the same five-stance scheme. They are also browsable in the explorer below via the source filter — and, being in English already, need no translation.

Explore the articles · 检索原文

Read the corpus yourself自行检索全部文章

Every coded article — Chinese People's Daily plus the English-language sources (People's Daily English and China Daily). Filter by source, stance, audience, theme, and year, or search the headlines. Each card shows the driving sentence — the actual phrase about 国际秩序 — an English translation (for the Chinese articles), why the model coded it that way, a link to the archive, and an open-web search.

About & methods · 数据与方法

How this was built关于本站

This site presents a descriptive content analysis of People's Daily (人民日报) coverage of the international order, 1950–2026. Articles were found by the exact phrase 国际秩序 (guójì zhìxù) and read by a large language model that assigned each a stance (Defend / Reform / Defend-and-Reform / Revisionist / Accusatory), a tone and valence, the audience it addresses, and an issue-theme. The coder was validated against a human-coded gold standard (Cohen's κ ≈ 0.68–0.79; a keyword baseline reaches only ≈0.30).

The patterns shown here also appear in four other sources — Xinhua wire copy, China's UN General Assembly speeches, Ministry of Foreign Affairs press briefings, and China's external behaviour — which is why we present them. But everything here is association and description, not causal claim. The point of the explorer is to let you check the coding and read the articles for yourself.

Corpus: 5,074 People's Daily articles · Span: 1950–2026 · Source: data.people.com.cn (subscription archive), paper.people.com.cn, people.com.cn.